Who can forget the scene of disarray outside the United States Supreme Court on the night of Dec. 12? Dozens of television lights and cameras were trained on the court's dark plaza as journalists and lawyers, fighting a stiff wind, flipped through the 65-page, six-opinion decision of Bush v. Gore, seeking the fate of the 2000 presidential election.

Was the vote 7 to 2 or 5 to 4? Was the case remanded to Florida? It soon became clear that the Supreme Court, the one branch of government with no explicit constitutional role in elections, had selected the nation's next president. It had done so using an entirely novel and, for the five majority justices, entirely uncharacteristic equal protection argument from the 14th Amendment. And, contrary to the widely accepted role of such decisions, this one had no precedential value. The majority justices claimed to have sliced the nation's Gordian knot of a succession crisis. We were expected to be grateful.

There is no doubt that many Americans were relieved that the court had put the country out of its 36-day misery. Most appear to have accepted the decision and the president. A January Gallup poll found that a majority viewed the Supreme Court with the same high measure of esteem as before. But those who make their living studying the court were generally shocked. Many have, in effect, remained on the harshly lighted court plaza, probing the decision, sifting through the constitutional chaos, assessing the damage they feel the court has brought on itself and the nation.

These books, by two of the country's most productive legal minds, are among the first full-length treatments of Bush v. Gore. A slew of law journal articles and collections of essays are also just out or due out shortly (including the balanced and thoughtful collection ''The Vote: Bush, Gore and the Supreme Court,'' edited by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard A. Epstein, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in October and currently available as an e-book on the Web site www.thevotebook.com).

The overwhelming scholarly assessment is that the ruling in Bush v. Gore is a poor model of judicial reasoning. It is unsteadily grounded and hard to square with the justices' previous decisions, and it reduces confidence in the court. Most analysts simply find it impossible to swallow the idea of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, O'Connor, Kennedy and Thomas, who have spent years fighting the liberal expansion of the equal protection clause, seizing upon it as a basis for stopping a voter recount. But on the decision's overall legitimacy and appropriateness, commentators are divided. Not evenly divided, to be sure, given the liberal bent of the legal academy, but the split is deep and troubling. It is well represented by these two books.+

Tocqueville commented more than a century and a half ago that ''the president may slip without the state suffering'' and ''Congress may slip without the Union perishing,'' because the voters can replace both. But justices are appointed for life, he noted, and ''if ever the Supreme Court came to be composed of rash or corrupt men, the confederation would be threatened by anarchy or civil war.''

In ''Supreme Injustice,'' Alan M. Dershowitz charges that the court majority is, in fact, corrupt. Dershowitz, of course, has not built a reputation for understatement. And he played a role in this case, representing several thousand Palm Beach residents who inadvertently voted for Patrick Buchanan instead of Al Gore on the confusing ''butterfly ballot.'' But here Dershowitz speaks for a large number of his colleagues, most of whom believe the court should have stayed out of this case and let the process take its course. Dershowitz goes so far as to place Bush v. Gore in a category beyond the court's most famous self-inflicted wounds: the Dred Scott decision, which in effect called black Americans property, and Plessy v. Ferguson, which legitimized segregation as ''separate but equal.'' At least in those cases, Dershowitz says, the justices were acting consistently with their own warped judicial philosophies. But here, he charges, the majority acted out of personal political preference, and therefore Bush v. Gore ''may be ranked as the single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history.'' (That statement, it should be pointed out, is mild compared with the view of Vincent Bugliosi, a former Los Angeles deputy district attorney. In an article in The Nation that he has padded out into a book titled ''The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President,'' published by Thunder's Mouth Press, he calls the justices in the majority ''criminals in the very truest sense of the word.'' On comments by Clarence Thomas and William Rehnquist that politics played no part, he writes, ''Well, at least we know they can lie as well as they can steal.'')

Richard A. Posner, a federal judge on the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and the author of an extraordinary array of books on law and society, has written a powerful defense of the ruling in ''Breaking the Deadlock,'' to be published in September and available this month as an e-book at Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com. Posner concedes that more Floridians probably meant to vote for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. He also concedes that the equal protection basis for the Supreme Court ruling was faulty (although he contends a better one was available). Yet he says the court ruled appropriately and honorably. It acted in the tradition of constitutional pragmatism, averting a looming national crisis that would have resulted from the dispute ending up in Congress, where partisan forces would most likely have run wild. On balance, Posner says, Bush v. Gore was therefore ''a rather good'' decision.

That two such nimble and serious legal thinkers as Dershowitz and Posner can arrive at such opposing conclusions speaks to the distressingly subjective nature of the law. Some 50 court cases resulted from the Florida electoral tie, and every single one of the rulings is open to legitimate competing interpretation. Since the law is supposed to serve as an anchor under shifting political seas, this can be disconcerting to contemplate. It is especially upsetting in this case because if Gore had held the lead and Bush had sought the recount, it seems most unlikely that the justices and scholars would have taken the same positions. As Frank Michelman of Harvard Law School puts it in his contribution to the Sunstein-Epstein collection, one's view in this case seems to depend on whose Gore was getting oxed.

To get a taste of the elasticity of judicial reasoning, it is helpful to venture, at least briefly, into the legal thicket that grew out of two conflicting Florida laws. One requires that when an election result is in doubt as a result of tabulation error, there be a hand recount (a long, laborious and subjective process); the other says that final results must be delivered within a week of Election Day. Florida's secretary of state, Katherine Harris, focused on the deadline (convenient since Bush was ahead and she had been active in Bush's campaign). The Florida Supreme Court extended the counting deadline (convenient since six of the seven justices there were appointed by Democrats). It said that to stop the counting violated the ''pre-eminent'' right to vote found in the state's constitution and that Harris was engaged in ''hypertechnical reliance upon statutory provisions.''+

The Florida court's action doesn't seem strange on its face. That is what state courts do -- interpret and reconcile statutes based on things like the state constitution. But Posner says the Florida court was woefully overreaching. The law permits a full hand recount if there is ''an error in the vote tabulation which could affect the outcome of the election.'' (It also says that if the recounting goes beyond the seventh day, its results ''may be ignored'' by the secretary of state.) Posner says the Florida court and its defenders have confused tabulation error with voter error. Voters must fully punch through their ballot cards. If they fail to do so, the machines are programmed not to count them. That is what happened in Florida; no law was broken. As Posner puts it, ''If you put a steel bar into a meat grinder and hamburger meat doesn't come out, do you call this an error by the meat grinder?'' He says the Gore mantra of ''count all the votes'' was meaningless. All the ballots were counted, that is, tabulated twice by machine. Those ballots that had been spoiled by the voters, generally through failure to punch the hole through, were appropriately rejected. Once you allow such votes to be hand-counted, Posner says, you open the process up to unbearable subjectivity (hanging chads, dimpled chads). The Supreme Court rightly stepped in to correct the Florida court's errors.

Agree or not, for devotees of public policy there are few pleasures as keen as reading Richard Posner. He is clever, original and tough-minded. For example, he dismisses those who argue that Bush's legitimacy is harmed by Gore's victory in the popular vote by comparing the election to a tennis match: if a player wins more sets while his opponent wins more games, no one disputes the outcome. Posner, a leader in the law and economics movement, is unsentimental about the nation's governing system: ''American democracy,'' he writes, ''is structured, formal, practical, realistic and both supportive of and supported by commercial values. It is not starry-eyed, carnivalesque or insurrectionary. It is not pure or participatory democracy, and it does not consider political chaos a price worth paying to actualize the popular will.'' His book is worth the price of admission just to watch him spin out a scenario whereby Lawrence Summers, then secretary of the treasury, would have become acting president -- and America's first Jewish president -- if the Supreme Court had not stepped in.

DERSHOWITZ is at his best in his exposure of how Bush v. Gore is inconsistent with previous decisions of the majority justices. With ease, he hoists them by their own petards. Antonin Scalia, for instance, wrote in a 1996 case: ''The Supreme Court of the United States does not sit to announce 'unique' dispositions. Its principal function is to establish precedent -- that is, to set forth principles of law that every court in America must follow.'' Yet this case was limited to the present circumstances.

But for John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who contributed to the Sunstein-Epstein collection, the limited nature of the decision actually increases its legitimacy. He contrasts Bush v. Gore with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion decision that he and many other lawyers consider poorly grounded, saying that Roe has kept the court in the center of political controversy for years, whereas Bush will not.

Whenever judges hand down far-reaching decisions, supporters applaud their courage while dissenters warn of the dangers of raw judicial power. In the 1930's, the left was livid at the Supreme Court's obstruction of the New Deal. In the 60's and 70's, the right was horrified at the court's expansion of the rights of privacy (read ''women''), minority groups and criminal defendants. Now, with the courts again solidly in the hands of conservatives, the argument is shifting again. Dershowitz ends his book with a lament that liberals had foolishly considered the judicial system ''ours'' and had brought conservative judicial activism on themselves by promoting liberal judicial activism. In other words, Bush v. Gore is the payback for Roe v. Wade. The time has come, he warns, without apparent irony, to depoliticize the judiciary and seek nominees who are great rather than politically reliable. The problem, of course, is that legal greatness often shifts with the political context. Bush v. Gore simply unmasked the context in an unsettlingly partisan fashion.